


from the desk of... Carver Edlund

by blacklid



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dreams, Gen, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-23
Updated: 2010-03-23
Packaged: 2017-10-26 05:29:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/279255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacklid/pseuds/blacklid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A letter from Chuck about the end of it all, and when is that ever good news? Dreams are the truth that never make any sense. This is Chuck. It's about the future. He might be right. He might be really, really wrong. He's not sure which he'd rather be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	from the desk of... Carver Edlund

**Author's Note:**

> A dream that I literally had one night. Speculative end to season five.

Guys,

I just wanted to say that I've had this dream three nights in a row now and I think it might mean something, or at the least, it might help you somehow. All I can say is, I hope it doesn't come true. Also, I was there with you guys - in the dream - but the thing is, I wasn't me. I was someone else. I don't know who I was. As discomforting as that particular scenario may be, it's good to know that you're not alone when all of this goes down.

Anyway. I'm not going to spruce this up or make it intelligible. I think it was supposed to be this way. I mean, that it doesn't make any sense.

The whole thing happened in black and white. Not the kind where you're watching an old movie, but the kind where everything around you is so dark that the only contrast is that pinprick of light that is just bright enough to show outlines and movements and things up close. It took me most of the dream to realize that the flashes I remember most vividly were lightning strikes and the rest of the time it was... well, I'll just say it:

It was a dark and stormy night.

I woke up in the dream - you know the kind, where it feels like the rest of your life is the lie and that where you are now is what's real. I woke up alone, lying on the wet ground, in the dark. It was raining. I slammed my hands out on the ground to try to get up and one of my arms started falling through the mud. I lost my balance and started to fall in, and then it got worse. Arms were coming out of the mud and they grabbed at me and I tried to pull away, but I couldn't escape. It turned out to be you, Sam, coming up out of the ground. 

We seemed to recognize each other from before, but what "before" that might have been, I no longer remembered and neither did you. I hadn't lost as much ground as I first thought and I helped you climb out. We sat there in stone silence for a few minutes, letting the rain wash the filth off, and then I got up and started walking away. You asked where I was going and I didn't say anything.

We walked together, but you walked behind me instead of alongside. You said you were fine letting me lead, but I got the sense that it was more about you watching my six, keeping me safe from something you feared. I laughed silently to myself about the irony of that. I was not afraid. 

We were walking along and you kept asking where your brother was and I didn't know, but I didn't get the idea that we were looking for him, either. The rain had stopped and you were still walking behind me, Sam, when your weight caved in the earth over which I had just walked. I called your name, but you bent down into the hole and disappeared. I walked back and looked down but it was so dark that I could only hear you talking. It sounded like you were talking to someone else.

Your voice got closer again and you told me to stay back, and so I leaned forward to help you out. Lightning struck around us and then I could see that you were trying to pull something out of the hole with you. It was Dean. But he wasn't awake. I jumped in to help you pull him up and lay him on the ground. You were trying to wake him up and I was patting down his arms and legs, looking for damage or a reason that he wouldn't wake up and then I realized that he wasn't even dirty from being in the ground. 

When Dean finally woke up, it felt like days later, even though it had never been light.

Sam and I had just camped in the woods where we found you and built a fire and were waiting for you. The first thing you said, Dean, after you looked into the fire for a long time was that you wanted to find the bastard who'd woken you up. You insisted that it wasn't Sam. None of what you said or did acknowledged in any way that the two of you were brothers, like Sam's did. Don't take that the wrong way, Dean. I know it was just a dream. I'm just telling you what happened.

Sam kept trying to tell you that we had found you this way and that you woke up on your own, but I knew better somehow. You were both yelling and arguing about it. I was trying to tell you what happened but I had to shout over Sam - I felt like I knew much more than what had happened to all of us so far and I wanted to tell you -  but none of my words were getting through and it escalated to the point where you were in each other's faces, throwing punches, and I was holding onto each of you to keep you both there and hold you an arm's length away from each other. 

I was... quite a bit bigger physically in this dream, obviously. I was doing things that were impossible in the natural order -- because who could get between you two, right? -- and that's when I knew I wasn't me.

If I'd had the chance to say in the dream what I knew, maybe I'd know now and I could impart it to you. But... I don't. I do have a feeling, though, that what I would have said there in the dark woods was put to practical use in the last part of the dream, so maybe it's the same thing.

Dean, you were determined to find this "thing" that had done this. You yanked free from my grip on your clothes so fast that I had part of your jacket still in my hand and I stood there staring at it like it was going to come to life, too. You walked out into the darkness, alone. I couldn't have stopped you any more than I could have stopped a freight train. You left in the same direction I had been going in when I found Sam, even though we'd never spoken of it.

Sam yelled after you briefly and then came back and sat down by the fire, like he was distracted by answering a phone call or something, like he was listening to a message in the flames. After less than a minute, Sam jumped up and ran to the edges of the light cast by the fire, and scratched past the refuse of the forest floor and into the dirt for something. He was in a hurry, like he'd just been told about it, where it was, and that he was running late. He paused and then looked up slowly and pulled some sort of weapon out of what appeared to be thin air.

When he stood up, he froze and looked at me, like he was willing me to understand something for which he couldn't find the words. It was so dark in the recesses of the woods with all the rain and tree limbs throwing shadows over everything that I couldn't tell what the thing was in his hand: it was two or three times longer than his fist and curved on at least one side, maybe both. It could have been a thick tree branch for all I was able to see of the outline. I couldn't see his face either, only the tense way he was standing there with his head tilted to one side... and then he took off without a word.

I went after both of you. At first, it was rough going, trying to catch up. The woods were overgrown and it had started to rain again, but it was retreating, or we were walking out of it, I don't know which. I could see both of you in the distance whenever the moon would break through the storm.

Sam caught up to you in the distance, Dean, but as soon as he did, he altered his direction and headed away so that eventually the three of us were making a shape like a divining rod. That would have been funnier if we'd been looking for water, but we were already drenched. I was getting tired and I no longer had the breath to shout after both of you to stop or wait, so I kept jogging and I made up the ground by going straight up the middle, barely keeping you both in sight on either side of me. One more long lighting strike revealed a lot. I could see both of your faces when I turned to look at each of you: grim and determined. You walked apart but you seemed to have the same goal in mind and were racing to see who got there first. When I looked in front of me, I saw a clichéd large creepy house on a steep hill. It looked like a cross between the Adams Family house and every spooky haunt in Scooby Doo, complete with gabled towers and sad eyed windows.

We cleared the woods and when you saw each other, you both started running up the hill toward the house. If you had been any further apart, you would have been approaching it from opposite poles. I ran, too, but I was no match for either of you. When we got closer, I could see what looked like a castle wall surrounding the house. Dean was the fastest and he reached the gate first. I had almost caught up and I was right behind Sam. Dean had enough of a lead on us that the wooden gate in the wall was starting to close again, but Sam fell into it and I stumbled in behind him.

What we saw when we looked up for you, Dean, was mesmerizing. You were awestruck, too. There was nothing but light. Everywhere.

All three of us just stood there, facing the light as it grew brighter. As soon as the outline of a figure appeared in the light and started walking towards us, Dean turned, snatched the weapon out of Sam's hand, and lunged forward. 

Sam, we almost didn't stop him. All we managed to grab were the tails of the leather jacket and we both yanked as hard as we could until we could manage to get a hold of an arm or part of a torso. Dean, I don't know a nice way to put this, so suffice it to say that you were going batsh** insane. You demanded that we let go of you and you didn't care what happened. We kept shouting at you to stop, that you couldn't kill him, and you wrestled against us with all your strength and called us both traitors. 

Then you gasped and started kicking, Dean, mostly because you were trying to stop what happened next: you started floating. The figure had picked you up and was trying to take you from us. Sam yelled at you to hang onto us and it got really windy -- like, the harder we held on, the crazier the wind got until it felt like we were in a tornado. You twisted around, Dean, and as soon as you were looking at Sam -- you looked totally freaked out, by the way -- the wind stopped and we all fell down, just like in that stupid nursery rhyme.

We scrambled up to our knees, holding onto each other's arms and not daring to let go. I told you both to keep your eyes inside the circle, to only look inside it and at each other and not to believe anything else we saw and if we could do that, we'd be okay. 

The figure by now had walked up to us close enough to touch and yet it was still as black as when it first appeared. The only way we could see it was by the outline created by the light around it. It had a voice though, and it walked in a circle behind us, waving at the air over our heads and saying, "duck, duck. duck...." 

When he said "goose", Dean blinked and when he opened his eyes again they were completely white. 

Both of you clenched my arms so tight that I flinched and Dean whispered that he couldn't see, and how could he look at us and believe something if he couldn't see. Sam, you started talking, telling him that you were right there and that you hadn't gone anywhere and to look at the sound of your voice. Dean's white eyes were glaring into the void and stared vacantly at Sam's chest when thin black smoke started to thread around his head and into his nose and his mouth. He started gasping and choking that he couldn't breathe and Sam, you squeezed my arm even harder because you couldn't think of what to say. I started talking to Dean that he actually could and that none of it was real. It was only an illusion, that the power of the greatest illusionists is drawn from those who believe it in terms of how they experience it and not for what it really is, that there is always a deeper truth below the surface.

You kept choking, Dean, but you choked out the words, "I can breathe," around the black smoke and the more you repeated it, the thinner the smoke became. Sam was still talking and telling you that yes, of course you could, and his heavy voice vibrated with laughter and relief, when suddenly you both became mannequins.

Your voices fell silent, your faces froze in place, expressionless eyes stared out into the wind and dark light. All I could hear was the wind swirling behind us and we were in the eye of it. I started to talk to your plastic, frozen faces, telling you that it was my turn now and I was only seeing statues, that I couldn't hear your voices and that your arms were weightless and as smooth as glass in my hands. It was very isolating and that that was what he wanted most of all -- that he had some empty victory or revenge if he could tear us apart.  I kept talking because I knew that you both could still hear me even though, from what I was seeing, it would have fallen on deaf ears. I didn't know what was happening to you, but it didn't matter because we were going to beat this, that I wasn't letting go and I wasn't giving up. It felt like a long time and it felt like a few seconds. It was like watching wax melt off a dummy, the way your faces started to break through or freeze back up, as my resolve swayed and doubt swirled in my guts. It was horrible, way worse than that time I got roofied, drank a whole bottle of wine and chased it with tequila shots. 

It was hard enough having it happen to yourself in your own head, knowing that it affected all three of us every time. So, it was doubly hard to overcome when it happened to you guys and triply hard when it was Sam's turn because... well. 

Sam kinda... burst into flames. I don't mean flames like the edge of his jacket caught on fire accidentally. I mean, Dean, you and I, we looked up and Sam's face kept melting, and there was fire in his eyes and he was terrified. He was jerking away from us and telling us to let go or we would burn up, couldn't we see that he was on fire... and man, that was hard. Every instinct tells you to let go. But if you do... you just can't.

We didn't. 

I think for a split second, we both expected for it to spread and all three of us would go up in smoke, but Dean, you said something very strange. You said we couldn't die in a fire if it was raining. That if he could make stuff up and we could see it, then why couldn't we do the same thing. Sam said, "Okay, let's make it rain." When it started to rain, none of us laughed because none of us were surprised, that is until you asked Sam what had gone wrong between the two of you "all that time ago, because the rain wasn't purple". 

There were still flames on Sam's arms and on his chest and in his eyes, and Dean's eyes were still white and he was still laced with smoke and I was still holding onto glass. You guys were looking at each other and smiling, finally, and then Sam said, "Let's go now," and Dean nods and the-me-that-was-there nods and then... nothing happened. 

I mean, he - the figure - just disappeared. Well, I mean, he wasn't dead or destroyed or plastered all over my living room walls, but he was gone, like a Jack in the Box stuffed back in the box or something, and we were in my living room in that circle. We all let go and sat down and none of us moved or spoke. And then I woke up.

I hope this is good news.

-Chuck

P.S. Becky says hi.


End file.
